Sorry to not give notice, but I have been on the road. While driving, I listened to Rush as long as I could- I made it seven minutes. Then switched to DC 101, and I have to say, the status of rock and roll is not good. Awful, I would say some guy screaming out of tune about getting his punk ass off the street and then something about closing the god damned door. That was all I could take of that, before I contemplated switching back to Limbaugh. I just turned the radio off and finished the drive in silence.
Open Thread
This post is in: Get off my grass you damned kids
piratedan
I invested in both a 6 disk CD player and XM Radio and I still consider it money well spent, keeps me off the radio because the number of stations that can play three decent songs in a row is about as rare as a compassionate Republican these days.
The Dangerman
Gotta cue up the other Rush (Geddy and company); Neil Peart may be the best rock drummer around.
stuckinred
Uh, they have these things called iPods.
Art
We do a lot of traveling to visit with family, and I couldn’t do it without satellite radio.
Terrestrial radio just sucks.
jeffreyw
Random pot of Italian beef.
Tony J
You know, you can play CDs in these new fangled automobiles. I hear you can even plug your personal gramatophone into some form of artificial shouting machine that will let you listen to all kinds of things you like without too much trouble.
Christ, Cole. Do you have to heat your Smoothing Iron in the oven before getting unsightly creases out of your smock? You are not a lost child of the Amish, let it go.
Elizabelle
I don’t miss DC101. Very restricted playlist.
Miss WHFS terribly.
Sounds like you were treated to Panic at the Disco? Which is not even a new song.
Punchy
I’m torn between rooting for the hated, HATED Packers and the Cheapshot Artists Formally Known as The Hines Ward Steelers. All I’m left with is to root for injuries and/or a bomb scare. What a shitty SB choice for me.
As for radio, why not sportstalk radio?
twiffer
@stuckinred: beat me too the punch.
even if your car does not have an AUX port, there are adapters that will play it over FM. you have to remove your antenna for ’em to work properly, but they do work well.
Nicole
Thanks, John. You put in just enough description that I had to Google to figure out the song or let my curiosity and mild OCD torment me all afternoon. Panic At the Disco, “I Write Sins Not Tragedies.” Yeah, I don’t get them either.
Poopyman
@Tony J: To be honest, if he’s listening to Rush, it might be on an 8-track.
Nicole
@Elizabelle: Clearly you are much more up on music five years ago than I am- I had to look it up. I think I’d better go sit in my rocking chair and pop in a cassette while I play Duck Hunt.
stuckinred
@twiffer: If you are in the boonies they work with out yankin the antenna.
Josie
@jeffreyw: I made your recipe for sausage and sauerkraut today. It seemed like the perfect cold weather dish, and it is so yummy.
Lavocat
How long before you start yelling at all of us: “get offa my lawn!”?
Cole, the years have not been kind to you.
JGabriel
John Cole:
Christ, Cole, I’ve got 5-10 years on you, and even I’m not as old fogey as you are when it come to music. Why, for instance, when I was a college radio dj in the 80’s, I had to walk 3 miles carrying 165 lbs of vinyl on my back, uphill both ways, just so we kidz could hear, speaking of loud punks, The Replacements.
.
cmorenc
This is exactly why I got Sirius/XM Satellite radio a couple of years ago, and have since not listened to more than an hour aggregate total of regular FM-band or AM-band radio altogether. Even their different music-genre stations can sometimes get mildly repetitive, e.g. I’ll hear the same blues song 3x during the same week on Sirius 74 (blues station), I’ve found that their different-genre stations are each pretty good, except that for some reason the selection of their two classical stations runs a bit heavier toward the more recent more romantic era, and a bit less so toward the Baroque or Beetoven eras. One annoying downside is that their purported “Talk Left” station, #146, is a real mixed bag, with not quite enough of the really good (e.g. Thom Harman, Stephanie Miller, and perhaps Ed Schultz who even so isn’t everyone’s cup of tea) but too much of the mediocre-to-awful (Alex Bennett, the lunatic leftie Mike Malloy, and the unbearably shallow-thinking, obnoxious PUMA Lynn Samuels).
Poopyman
@Elizabelle: I miss WHFS too, but to be honest, I pretty much grew out of their playlist before they went off the air.
In “normal” times I’d recommend the classical stations, but both WETA and WBJC are pimping for dollars this week.
soonergrunt
I have Sirius XM in my car. Worth every penny. When I’m not listening to that, I have a 64 GB SD card of high quality MP3 and WMA files plugged in. three different NPR channels, and oh, yeah, my android phone streams Pandora through the bluetooth connection to my car stereo if it comes to it.
These are not new technologies, either. Any car built in the last five years should support at least one of these, and if not, then a new car radio should.
Mark S.
@Punchy:
It can be tough to find sports radio out in the boonies. Actually, it’s pretty hard to find anything besides Rush and insane radioevangelevists.
ABloomquist
I live in the Twin Cities, so I get to enjoy 89.3 The Current all day long (seriously, if you want to check out new music that isn’t Top 40 Hits, stream their feed. It’s good stuff).
Geoduck
@Punchy: I like the Packers because they are (more or less) owned by their fans. If my local taeam (Seattle) had to play them more often, perhaps I’d feel differently..
kdaug
I’m bettin’ you’ve got a fine singing voice, Cole. Why let others do for you what you can do for yourself? (Provided no passengers in the car, of course).
ETA: (In my best Eddie Murphy voice) ROXXXX-ANNNE!
Mojotron
you can hear the quality of the music degrade as you travel from Baltimore to DC. As a kid I didn’t care much for the Greaseman and DC101’s heavy rotation of Skynyrd, Foreigner, and 38 Special, now those are “the good old days”.
cleek
i tried Rush once in high school. the stuff gave me a wicked headache.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Punchy:
I’m pulling for an unexpectedly prolonged blizzard followed by a midnight, no-injuries dome collapse. Nobody gets hurt and it creates lots of new construction jobs, so it’s a win-win.
Chyron HR
Shoulda turned the dial to 94.7 FM, the classic rock station.
OH NO WAIT THEY DON’T PLAY CLASSIC ROCK ANYMORE BECAUSE WHO WOULD WANT TO LISTEN TO THAT HA HA HA assholes
MikeJ
@Elizabelle:
HFS was great before they made any money. Which I understand is not a commercially viable proposition, but for music fans it was a better station. By about ’96 the quality had nosedived.
I had a friend who did, uhm afternoon drive? Evenings? I forget. At DC101. I don’t know that I ever actually heard him on the air.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
Maybe you should check out this band. I hear they’re pretty rad.
1st song ‘Truculent’ is an ode to the SUV. Their, uh, ‘hit.’
Splitting Image
All you need is Love
Throw out that other garbage.
geg6
Is your car so old that it doesn’t have even a CD player?
I mean, I am so technologically backwards that I don’t own an iPod and can’t figure out how to use the one on my iPhone, so I can relate to that. But not even a CD? Seriously, Cole?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I like Panic at the Disco. That was their Fall Out Boy influenced album. If haven’t heard that song much, John, I would also say it has something to do with your state. Though I love the “music sux now” comment: When has it never sucked?
JCJ
@ABloomquist
I heard The Current a couple of years ago when I took my daughter to see the University of Minnesota. I stream it on occassion since it is high quality stuff.
Sentient Puddle
Sounds like we need to help you find the good modern rock. I haven’t paid enough attention to it lately, so I might not be the best person to list off a bunch of stuff, but it’s hard to go wrong with Queens of the Stone Age.
freelancer
To be fair, Panic’s first album had entirely too much influence from the band that signed them, Fall Out Boy. Their second album is quite a stunning piece of music; there’s a heavy Sgt Pepper feel to it.
From a Mountain in the Middle of the Cabins
She Had the World
I don’t listen to their first album, cause it does nothing for me.
geg6
@cleek:
Me, too! That really is the suckiest band ever!
Oh, wait…well, I tried that, too. ;-)
JGabriel
Sarah Palin® has applied to trademark her name. (via TPM)
(I’m MuParadigm in the comments there.)
.
Comrade Javamanphil
@JGabriel: Loudest concert I ever attended was the Replacements. Had no idea what songs they played most of the night. You literally couldn’t tell. Afterward I heard the covered U2s I Will Follow. They were also smashed. In short, an awesome show.
Signed a fellow vinyl-carting college DJ from the 80s
Violet
On road trips I love scanning through stations, both AM and FM. There’s nothing more fun that picking up some AM station from who knows where.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYoidn4QRMI
Switching it over to AM
Searching for a truer sound
Can’t recall the call letters
Steel guitar and settle down
Catching an all-night station somewhere in Louisiana
It sounds like 1963, but for now it sounds like heaven
Catsy
Oh man, DC 101. I used to listen to the Greaseman in the morning before school all the time in the 80’s. With the benefit of age and hindsight it’s obvious what a bigot he was, and I’ve tried and failed to enjoy listening to some of his classic material, but he was funny as hell when I was a kid and didn’t really understand half the jokes or why they were so offensive.
stuckinred
@Splitting Image: Fuckin A right. I saw him/them about a year before he died and was amazed how well he and the music held up. Most people have no clue. Check out this pic of the Whiskey in 66 and note the bands.
PeakVT
Some Cyclone Yasi pics.
JGabriel
@geg6: I think cleek actually did mean the band.
.
geg6
@Comrade Javamanphil:
You don’t know loud. I saw the Ramones at CBGBs in 1977. Not just loud. Dirty and violent, too. It was fucking awesome.
Nerull
I looked up that song on youtube to see if I remembered it. I did. It sucks.
Also, the video had a very Clockwork Orange wannabe vibe to it.
ET
DC area radio sucks rotten eggs. There is a Baltimore station whose call numbers I can’t remember (Jack-FM 102.7 I think but don’t quote), plays80s on the weekends.
stuckinred
@geg6: All you do is plug it into whatever computer you have your music on and launch iTunes (why do I think you don’t have iTunes?) and manage the musicon yer phone from there.
geg6
@JGabriel:
Well, if he did, I can relate. The band gave me more headaches than the amyl ever did. Whenever I hear the opening strains of one of their songs, the radio (or whatever) gets immediately turned off.
MikeJ
@JGabriel: You play the Mats on a thread about radio and don’t go for Left of the Dial?
The version of Kids Don’t Follow you did post is excellent. High quality sound, great mix, they even appear mostly sober. More sober than I ever saw them in the 80s.
Tony J
@Poopyman:
To be fair, the average West Virginian professional needs – something – to drown out the sound of his mule’s laboured breathing.
singfoom
Wait. People listen to commercial radio still?
Really? Yeah, get thyself an iPod and a car radio adapter Cole. No reason to subject yourself to horrible top 40 music and awful advertisements and the assholery of radio DJs.
Or hell, if you have a real old car, make yourself a mix tape fer Chrissakes.
I will say this though:
When I was a travelling consultant and regularly flew into Atlanta at 11PM and had an hour drive up to my hotel, listening to Mark Levin scream about liberals etc certainly kept me awake in the rental car…..though I might have scared other drivers with my screaming and gesturing at the radio as I drove.
piratedan
anyone up to sharing anime preferences?
my preferred list, in no apparent order:
Cowboy BeBop
Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood
FLCL/Fooly Cooly
Working
His and Her Circumstances/Kare Kano
Trigun
Hikaru No Go
Beck
Cross Game
Lovely Complex
as always, ymmv ;-)
JGabriel
@Comrade Javamanphil:
It would have been more unusual if they were sober.
We were really pretty lucky at our station. About 25k records, about a quarter of it jazz. I only had to cart the occasional import, or lost/stolen punk classic, from my collection.
.
geg6
@stuckinred:
Oh, I have iTunes on both my computer (we get a deal through the University) and on my iPhone.
I’ve never gotten far enough to actually try to play a download. I’ve never been able to successfully download a song. I’ve tried a couple of times. It’s never worked. And, no, I can’t explain what I did or didn’t do that caused the problem. I have no idea.
bemused
Randi Rhodes just played the best clip from a Rush show. I don’t know how this caller got through but he asked Rush why conservatives are celebrating Reagan’s 100th birthday and revere him when Reagan gave undocumented immigrants a free pass plus many more examples of Reagan policies that are totally opposite of republican priorities today. Rush sounded tired because he just couldn’t seem to muster up any howling outrage or tell the caller he was a pinhead even when the caller pressed Rush on not answering his question.
It hasn’t been the easiest week for Rush. He had to pretend he was just joking about not caring that liberal journalists got beat up in Egypt after it happened to a Fox news person.
Holden Pattern
I’m going to jump on the dogpile here — your problem is not with the current state of rock and/or roll. Your problem is with commercial radio, which just absolutely, unbelievably, totally and completely sucks.
burnspbesq
@Elizabelle:
You are far from alone on that.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
You guys might wish you hadn’t said that.
RT @wfaachannel8: WFAA.com has confirmed that ice on the roof of Cowboys Stadium has fallen and injured 5 people. 1 critical
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@JGabriel: Posted about that earlier in the thread. I like the comment about how she’s just trying to get an R after her name without having to run for office.
Ruckus
@Tony J:
That’s bad. Funny as hell but bad none the less.
Gozer
I invested in a USASpec Ipod/Iphone interface for my car. I even adds a regular line-in capability so you can use any electronic device that has a headphone-out with the radio.
It definitely makes long rides bearable.
burnspbesq
Some of you may find this funny.
http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_lawandpolitics_archive.html#113756175348882886
cleek
@JGabriel:
oh no, i like Rush the band.
Poopyman
@geg6: Loud? Saw The Plasmatics in a ballroom in NY in ’78(ish). Wendy O. Williams was firing her (miked) machine gun and I STILL couldn’t hear it.
My hearing these days isn’t so good, come to think of it.
Comrade Javamanphil
@geg6: Nice. I saw the Cows at CBGBs and must admit that the bugle is an underrated rock instrument (and also exceptionally loud.)
Paul in KY
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): I’ve seen them in concert. With Fall Out Boy & Blink 182. Liked their show.
JGabriel
@MikeJ:
Yeah, I’m amazed by those videos. Apparently, it was a local music contest, and someone at Twin Records decided to hire a professional videographer to tape it with board sound. I mean, it was 1981, and hardly anyone had heard of those bands yet. Just amazing luck to catch a good ‘Mats performance so early in their career.
.
Poopyman
@geg6: Youtube has “Tom Sawyer”, and that’s about it. That says something.
twiffer
@piratedan: i am a dabbler, but i do like cowboy bebop. liked wolf’s rain enough to buy the DVDs. i’ll confess to watching bleach, cause, well, BIG FUCKING SWORDS!!!! not much else, though.
FLCL just confuses the hell out of me.
jeffreyw
@Josie: Thank you, it was pretty yummy, tho I think I wasted the great tasting Cajun breakfast sausage in it. What kind did you use?
cleek
@geg6:
my iTunes account went through a period where i couldn’t complete a download. was like that for months. i spent a lot of time with Apple tech support, who couldn’t do anything to fix the problem, but gave me plenty of refunds. multiple computers, plenty of re-installs, etc.. i ended up switching to Amazon downloads.
iTunes is now working for me again, but i still buy most things from Amazon.
Violet
@Litlebritdifrnt:
OMG, seriously? Holy cow! I knew they were having bad weather in Dallas, but…that’s bad.
Mnemosyne
Great, now I have that stupid Panic at the Disco song stuck in my head.
I do still listen to a lot of commercial radio (my 3 mile commute is too short to justify satellite radio). It’s kind of freaky how I can listen to songs by current bands and hear what I was listening to in the 80s. Like this one by Dogs Die in Hot Cars.
stuckinred
@geg6: You have to have an account with Apple to buy music on iTunes but you can import music from a cd or other external source. Just insert a cd and launch iTunes. The cd will appear on the left and you just click on it and it will ask you if you want to import. If you have audio files on an external drive you can drag and drop them into iTunes.
eta
If you have a mac there is a program called cosmopod that will download and youtube’s right into your iTunes.
piratedan
@twiffer: I watch Bleach too (its a habit I suppose), FLCL I do believe that the artists were chemically aided in their “storyline” but the music is top notch and the 3rd epsiode is poignant in many ways. I liked Wolf’s Rain too, just not enough to start the list (and that’s the case with a lot of series I have to say)
geg6
@Poopyman:
Hah! That would have been a great show, I bet. Wendy O was teh awesome.
And, yes, I’m with you on the hearing loss thing. All those years in basement night clubs with punk bands just whaling away, the entire crowd screaming and bashing each other (often in the head/ear), and sometimes police sirens like a cherry on top. Which reminds of the story of when I saw the Sex Pistols at the Decade, another great defunct punk/rock club in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh…
Ah, my youth.
kindness
On long road trips where I know I won’t get reception the whole way or don’t know the local stations I have found my i-pod to be my best source. Just run it through the car stereo & I have tunes I know I like. 37 days worth.
kdaug
@cmorenc: Personally, I’m more a Dropkick Murphys/Pogues kind of guy, but YMMV.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Litlebritdifrnt: Yikes! What a shame. I did specifically ask Santa Claus for “no injuries” (well, I’d make an exception for Roethlisberger’s face).
geg6
@Comrade Javamanphil:
Truly the dumpiest rock club of all time. Truly legendary filth there. I never once went to the bathroom there. Too terrified.
JGabriel
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
You did? Must be an earlier thread, cause I can’t find it in this one.
And yeah, the comment thread is pretty good on that one.
.
gnomedad
The only thing more painful than listening to Rush is the thought of millions of people slurping him up.
Dennis SGMM
What a bunch of dilettantes. When I was granted my driver’s license back in 1964 it was AM all the way, baby. I don’t think that you could even buy an American car with an AM-FM radio. And who needed one? You had Top 40 rock, News Radio (Sans blowhards), and Classics (Peggy Lee, Eddie Fisher, the Mills Brothers) – and all through one speaker (Vibrasonic if you were cool). FM was for long haired kooks who listened to classical music or jazz and who cares about that shit?
I concluded that driving was meant to foster introspection. Be grateful that you have so many options now. It was much worse.
Maude
I someone is going to listen to Rush in their car, shouldn’t they bring a sick bag like they use on the airlines?
JGabriel
@gnomedad:
Oh god, the mind-visual on that is just disgusting.
.
Mark
Blue Rodeo‘s got it all over Rush if you’re looking for Canadian music John.
Jay
“I would say some guy screaming out of tune about getting his punk ass off the street…”
The part about getting one’s “punk ass” off the street is from 3rd Eye Blind’s song, “Graduate.” Late ’90s. I was then in my late teens and watching “Dawson’s Creek” to try to get points with the girls.
I’d add that Steve Jenkins, the lead singer of Third Eye Blind, is living proof of how evil meth is. An admitted user, he once turned down Charlize Theron’s marriage proposal. What else but meth use explains THAT?
13th Generation
shoegaze
geg6
@stuckinred:
Well, as I mentioned, the University has a deal with iTunes and I set up an account when it was first announced several years ago. In addition, I was told when I bought my iPhone that I could use my University iTunes account on my iPhone. That would all be through Apple, right?
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Maude: I love the way this works for either Rush one might hear on the radio.
BGinCHI
@Mark: Or The Tragically Hip.
Buck
Cole:
For traveling, XM saved me.
But with your same reasoning, I’m ready to turn my TV off and sit in silence. Crappy, crappy television.
twiffer
@stuckinred: yeah, as long as there are no strong FM signals. granted, my new car as an AUX port, so, not an issue anymore.
abscam
@Tony J: I am with John 100% on this, but you have me in tears!
stuckinred
@geg6: Yea, you would have to have a credit card entered in your account to buy stuff. I have the same set-up and am the iTunesU admin for our outfit.
cleek
loudest show i’ve ever seen was Yo La Tengo at the Cat’s Cradle.
they opened with “Evanescent Psychic Pez Drop”, which, at the 1:00 mark, comes in with one of Ira’s trademark screeching guitar attacks. but, his guitar was turned up so loud in the mix that the entire crowd gasped, flinched and winced at the first note. all over the club, hands flew to ears. we left.
next time i saw them, we got right up to the stage, so the PA speakers were in back of us. much more pleasant that way.
was talking to a former manager of the Cats Cradle one night at a bar and he said one night he was waiting for the Replacements to take the stage when a bunch of stumblingly drunk guys came out of the crowd and jumped on stage, grabbed the instruments and started to play (badly). he rushed on stage, and shooed them off. they were, actually, the Replacement.
geg6
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
Heh. Indeedy.
gnomedad
@JGabriel:
Wow, just a couple of days after Cole spotted this guy. I guess she is now officially a product. Maybe she’ll get greedy and price herself out of the market so we won’t have to hear her name anymore.
Mnemosyne
@geg6:
Can you play songs through iTunes if you rip them from a CD? If so, then cleek’s workaround is great — Amazon puts their songs directly into your iTunes folder so you don’t have to search for them. Plus they’re not DRMed like Apple’s (mostly) are if you want to move them around.
twiffer
@geg6: is it just a problem with iTunes? if you run zone alarm and norton AV, there is a bug that prevents anything from downloading & installing. which is why i no longer have zone alarm as my firewall.
geg6
@stuckinred:
Then I’m back at square one, not knowing why the hell I can’t download anything. Not on the computer and not on the iPhone. Oh, well. I can survive without it. Unlike John Cole, I DO own and know how to use a CD player in my car. }->
numbskull
Podcasts, dude, podcasts.
Jules
My dogs are unhappy.
It is snowing.
The stupid dog is just standing there letting her big lab ass get covered with the falling snow…she will come in and go lay on the sofa wet.
The concerned dog is concerned and trying to figure out where they all can pee since nothing smells right.
The old one looked outside and said “fuck it, I’ll pee somewhere in the house later when she is not looking”.
and of course the cats are all just pissed….
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@geg6: Someday cleek will invent an implantable, customizable pie filter such that whenever Rush is audible, I’ll just hear The Lumberjack Song instead.
Poopyman
@Dennis SGMM: You failed to mention that your car had a push button shifter.
Raenelle
XM radio has a 24-7 Grateful Dead channel.
stuckinred
@Mnemosyne: Yes but it’s hit and miss on whether or not the track titles will import.
stuckinred
@Poopyman: Mopar!
Dog is My Co-Pilot
My truck radio is tuned to NPR full-time. Can’t stand the music stations.
gbear
@ABloomquist: Agreed. I realized how spoiled I’d gotten having The Current around when I bought a car that had XM radio and got the service free for three months. I couldn’t find a station I really liked on XM and just let the service expire rather than pay for it. I’ve been ‘paying’ for MPR as a member for 25 years and I think it’s money better spent than on XM.
That said, I’ve taken entire vacations with the car radio turned off. It’s is not required that we spend every waking moment glued to some form of outside stimulation. There’s lots of times when I’d rather just listen to the environment I’m in, even it it’s only the sound of the wind and other cars on the road. Nothing wrong with silence.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@piratedan:
Cowboy Bebop
FMA
X – The Series, not the movie
Big O
Third
Ghost in the Shell
stuckinred
@geg6: Tutortial
Violet
@cleek:
Henry Rollins was the loudest I’ve seen recently. Loudest overall…hmmm…not sure.
DougJ(c)
@Jay:
What an awful song that was.
suzanne
You’re such a curmudgeon. It’s a good thing we all find it so charming.
In your defense, Panic! At The Disco does such teh ballz. That’s why you program multiple stations in your presets. Although even that is not a failsafe. There have been times I have gone through all eight stations on my presets, and fully half of them were playing something by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I get it. You don’t wanna feel like you did that day. Shut up.
geg6
@twiffer:
LOL, your question is like Chinese to me.
Okay, to get serious, I have Norton AV on my computer but have no idea what zone alarm is. I don’t deal with any of that stuff. The campus IT people are the only ones who could answer your question. I really, truly am a technological idiot, though I’ve never had trouble downloading anything else other than music.
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t know. I’ve never tried. Mainly because I wouldn’t have a clue how to do it.
And now I know I’ve set the BJ techies to tsking and shaking their heads sadly.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@JGabriel: You’re right, I meant an earlier thread, not earlier in the thread.
stuckinred
@stuckinred: Torque Flight Shifter
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/44/120496403_c9d2aa8138_z.jpg?zz=1
Josie
@jeffreyw: I have to stay pretty low fat, so I used a turkey kielbasa. It worked fine with the fennel and a little caraway, and I liked the slightly sweet flavor of the sauerkraut. I used a Sam Adams Octoberfest beer, which also has sort of a sweet flavor. My son is out driving a truck in this cold (for us) weather, so I am saving some for him to warm him up when he gets home.
stuckinred
@geg6: You know what Groucho said “go out and get me a 12 year old child”!
Mnemosyne
@stuckinred:
I haven’t had that problem yet with Amazon. I do have a weird thing where after the site says the download is starting, I actually have to click on the file in my Downloads folder before it will actually start. Very odd.
geg6
@Poopyman:
Hey! My first car had a push button shifter, a 1966 Mercury Comet. What a piece of junk that thing was. But it only cost me $500 in 1975. I thought it was a great deal at the time.
stuckinred
@Violet: Blue Cheer, Vincebus Eruptem, Summertime Blues.
MikeJ
Loudest was either Eric Johnson or Ice-T.
Eric Johnson was in a place the fire marshal said held 144 and was just indescribably loud. He’s a hypertechnical player who you know just loves twiddling with equipment for its own sake and his whole band just had way too much stuff for a place that small.
Ice-T was at the old 9:30. The DJ set was good, and it was loud, but not too bad. For the second set Body Count played, Ice leaned over the crowd yelling that he wanted to see blood or people weren’t dancing hard enough. And they were fucking *loud*.
Redshift
I dunno, Sirius/XM doesn’t seem to do it for me. I got a year free with my new car a couple of years ago and let it lapse after that, and I renewed it recently because they had a really cheap “come back” deal, and I’m still unimpressed. It’s better than commercial radio (low bar), but not $13/month better.
It’s like cable TV; there are plenty of good things on it, and if you really want to listen to one kind of thing, it’s great. But unlike cable TV, the “things” are mostly 3-5 minutes long, and I don’t want to flip around constantly while I’m driving.
What am I missing?
stuckinred
@Mnemosyne: Stick with what works.
geg6
@stuckinred:
Yeah. Our intern told me he’d try to figure it out for me before the end of the semester. 12 yo = 20 yo, when it comes to this stuff, I’m thinking.
Redshift
@MikeJ: Loudest I ever saw was Black Market Baby, who opened for the Ramones once. They were uncomfortably loud and not very good, so we sat with our fingers in our ears until they were done.
I still remember the first concert I went to (Boston); a friend’s sister and brother-in-law took me and the friend since we weren’t old enough to drive by ourselves. We were impressed with how loud it was, and they told us that wasn’t loud; they’d seen Black Sabbath, who were above the pain threshold.
Morbo
@DougJ(c): Oh, good, I thought I was the only one who didn’t like it in my social group. Nice name.
handy
That guy’s great. Crazy as hell but very cathartic to listen to during the Bush years.
HyperIon
@Elizabelle wrote:
Wow. I haven’t thought about that station for a long time. I used to listen to it during the 80s.
And:
Sorry to be discouraging, Cole, but you are officially OLD.
Your remarks on the radio fare give you away.
Redshift
Oh, and Cole, DC 101 hasn’t had anything to do with the current state of rock&roll for a good fifteen or twenty years now.
NobodySpecial
I take my 8GB iPod everywhere, fuck commercial radio.
I plan on investing a bit later in a 32GB model so I can carry the majority of my music collection with me, too. Some weeks, 1500 songs just don’t cut it.
Lincolnshire Poacher
The Greater Seattle Area has seen an upheaval in the airwaves too. The Smooth Jazz station and Clear Channel’s alternative Funky Monkey saw their ratings take a hit when the industry implemented a new system of determining who listens, and thus drives ad revenue. Both immediately shifted to a 90s (JIM Fm) or Modern Music (KliK) format indistinguishable from several other stations in the area.
Colleges are eliminating their media programs and selling the stations, mostly to some NPR syndicate. Now if I want to hear the same All Things Considered program as long as possible I keep moving the dial. They air 30 minutes after the other one on the other stations, etc. Too many stations with the same unoriginal formats now.
It must be their goal to get everyone to buy satellite streaming radio. But those channels can repeat too. On one comedy format they played the same content after three or four hours in a loop. There is Ellen Degeneres out hunting deer, watching the deer, and wondering what the deer is thinking.
I agree … get off my lawn.
stuckinred
@geg6: Yup, we call em natives.
geg6
OMG, this is too funny:
http://www.nationalenquirer.com/john_boehner_house_speaker_sex_scandal_two_women/celebrity/70110
Wonder if this is their usual bullshit gossip mongering or if they are having another John Edwards moment?
Poopyman
@stuckinred: The one in my friend’s dad’s Plymouth was in a straight line, like the AM radio. I hope I’m remembering that rightly.
Linnaeus
KEXP, 90.3 FM, in Seattle. ‘Nuff said.
Even better: KVI (570 AM) in Seattle was forced to change formats from conservative talk radio to oldies. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer radio station.
Redshift
@geg6: Mike Stark posted over at GOS a few days ago that they’d talked to him (I think), and he seems to think it’s real.
gbear
@JGabriel: That Replacements video wasn’t from a contest, it was from a week long celebration of Twin Citie’s bands that Twin Tone recorded with the intent of releasing a box set of Twin Cities bands. I was in one of the bands. Kind of sucked when Twin Tone dropped the ball on that project. It wasn’t until 2008 that a full movie of those concerts was released, and it was only shown once (because Paul Stark from Twin Tone is and has always been a fucking blockhead).
kindness
Off the beaten track.
Ever look through failblog? I have to from time to time just to make it through the work week. Yes, I do it at work, sue me (or tell my boss). Anyway, here’s one that’s funny in an odd duck kind of way. It’s a shot of some of the head protection gear people in Egypt have rigged up for themselves:
http://thereifixedit.failblog.org/2011/02/04/white-trash-repairs-revolutionary-protection/
KG
I have to co-sign on the “get a satellite radio already” sentiment. I’ve got Sirius, there’s about 20 rock stations alone. I also love the Blues channel and the standards/swing channel (think Rat Pack), and the radio classics channel (old radio shows) is great for a change of pace.
Violet
@geg6:
It’s been rumored for awhile, but hadn’t broken out into a real story.
JGabriel
@gnomedad:
That link is hilarious, gnomedad. Thanks.
BTW, I totally stole that link and posted it in TPM’s comment thread.
.
Pangloss
When I worked at DC 101 in the early 80s, I mostly listened to WKYS.
KG
@geg6: remember what Tommy Lee Jones said in Men in Black… they’re the most reliable newspapers in the world.
Bulworth
Not sure why TPM feels it necessary to splash all over their front page something about an ambassador. #blogfail
twiffer
@geg6: zone alarm is a fairly popular free firewall. if it’s a university PC, chances are you don’t have it. and if you only have issues downloading music from iTunes, then don’t worry. probably an account setting or authorization issue.
Chat Noir
I saw my first concert 27 years ago today at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, NY. The Police were finishing up their Synchronicity tour shortly before they broke up. What a fabulous experience that was for a geeky 17 year old. Saw them again a few years ago at Pine Knob in Clarkston, MI, when they reunited; they were as good during their ’08 and ’09 tours as they were back in ’84.
lamh32
ughh..
I didn’t go to work today because i didn’t want to drive on the icy roads. now I’m hungry. I’m thinking of calling pizza hut, but the idea of the poor pizza guy slipping on the same ice I refuse to drive on, bothers me.
If I did call, I guess I could give the delivery dude a BIG tip.
I’m such a sap!!!
Raoul
East of DC and Balto you have 103.1 which is even better than the old WHFS.
Turgidson
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
As a Bears fan who hates the Packers and can’t root for a sexual deviant QB either, your ideas intrigue me and I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter!
JGabriel
National Enquirer via geg6:
I can’t say I care about the affair with LaMora, but the affair with Lyons, a lobbyist, looks like it may have a corruption angle — since her clients apparently had business before Boehner, and he supported all their positions.
.
James Hare
DC101 is one of the worst radio stations in the entire country. Once 99.1 switched to salsa music, rock in DC just died.
I got satellite radio just because I couldn’t stand listening to the same 15 songs from the 90s mixed with the most uninspiring rock music of today all the time.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Jules:
Jules that literally made me laugh out loud. I have a concerned dog and can just picture it.
KG
@JGabriel: not my area of practice, and I can’t recall from my law school IP class, but I thought you couldn’t trade mark a person’s name… and besides what goods or services is she planning on tying the mark to?
jeffreyw
@Josie: I wish I had some decent beer for mine, I had a big bottle of Guinness stout but I’m saving it for a mustard recipe. I ended up using a generic light pee beer lager.
polyorchnid octopunch
@BGinCHI: Time for my semi-annual pumping of Canadian rock and roll it seems….
If you like the older stuff… Lightfoot/Young/Mitchell/Cohen/The Band (those being the folks you might have actually heard of). Props to my fellow Kingstonian Zal Yanofsky of the Loving Spoonful. Of course you guys all know the Guess Who and BTO…
Lighthouse, Blood Sweat and Tears, the Stampeders, Triumph, The Kings, Ian Thomas (Painted Ladies), Mahogany Rush, Crowbar, Trooper, Chilliwack, April Wine, and Bruce Cockburn are all Canadian rockers you might be less familiar with.
If you like the punk, DOA, The Viletones, The Forgotten Rebels, and Teenage Head all rocked the house. Later punk bands I remember well were the Dayglo Abortions and SNFU. DOA are the grand old men of Canadian punk (talk – action = 0) and still tour.
Of course no look at Canadian rock is complete without mentioning the Rodeo Song by the Showdowns out of Alberta. Play that in a bar and you might get fired but the audience will love you.
On the french side, Harmonium, Beau Dommage, Jean Leloup et les salles affaires, Pagliaro are all worth checking out. Jean Leleoup is the shit, afaic: one of the best performers I’ve ever seen period.
gene108
@piratedan: FLCL contused the crap out of me the first time I saw it. It was on Adult Swim again and I watched it, because I was having a bout of insomnia.
Made some more sense the second time around.
The third time I really started digging the characters, the animation and the music and do rate it as one of my favorite Jap-mation (I think that’s what they were called, before people settle on anime) cartoons of all time.
None series, I’d throw out Vampire Hunter D, Naussica and the Valley of the Wind.
For series, I’d add Escaflowne and Nior. Nior starts of sort of slow, but it has some great plot twists at the end.
Poopyman
Meanwhile, in Cairo it’s “Al Tahrir, The Musical?”
(Needs more cowbell, if you ask me.)
polyorchnid octopunch
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: If you really want to keep it right, you need to sub in The Rodeo Song. <- NSFW… really NSFW.
Josie
@jeffreyw: I’ll be looking for the mustard recipe. I still have one bottle of beer in the fridge and will save it just for that. I like the way your recipes read–just like I cook.
Chris Wolf
We have WBAB on Long Island. I make a bet with whoever’s in the car with me at the time…before we get to where we’re going, we’ll hear either Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin or Van Halen. It’s a suckers bet.
jeffreyw
@Josie: There is a mustard recipe or two on there (w4d), search for stout mustard, there may be more than two, can’t remember now, awesome mustard.
edit ti add: http://whats4dinnersolutions.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/whole-grain-stout-mustard/
Jager
@Dennis SGMM:
Corvettes had AM-FM radios in the 60’s. The cool set up was dual speakers on the package shelf and a reverb and that was as good as it got. Some of the old AM Top 40’s were pretty good, WLS, CKLW, KOMA were all on my buttons, only get them after the sun went down, though. I learned all about R and B listening to John R out of Memphis, “dis is John R waay down South in Dixie”! John was the blackest white man that ever existed. He followed Rufus Thomas (Carla Thomas’ daddy) Rufus had a hit himself with “Walkin the Dog”…
gwangung
J Lo part of President Obama’s Super Bowl Party.
Damn. Obama’s FINALLY failed me.
JGabriel
@KG:
Me no lawyer, but apparently you can trademark a name by, as you say, tying it to goods and services:
*Yes, Bristol is getting a trademark too, but not Todd or Willow. Must be a two-for-one sale.
.
jinxtigr
Bad Brains played at my college. Hampshire College. Big stoner college. People heard they were a reggae band XD
They beat on the PA like it was a goddamn stompbox. Stoned people were fleeing in terror from the first notes, all upset :) it was epic, and one of the loudest noises I’ve ever heard :)
Honorable mention- as a kid I went with some cousins to a Night Ranger concert in a hockey arena. The air literally crackled from volume. Pity the music was so lame that caused this :)
Jager
@polyorchnid octopunch:
What! No Gino Vanelli?
Violet
@gwangung:
It’s weird she seems to be the only singer/actor/celebrity invited. His daughters must be American Idol fans.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@JGabriel: Is it OK to give Lyons a medal for bravery and then charge her with corruption?
ErinSiobhan
I can’t believe you apologized to this lot.
Jager
@JGabriel:
I’m going to trademark Todd Palin for educational services and then you guys can write shit about Sarah on the website.
Things like;
Sarah is making good money, but man, I’m not getting any of her hot little ass anymore and she’s bitchier than ever.
Josie
@jeffreyw: Thanks
bago
At home I wave at my screen and tell it to play music I like. (Kinect + Xbox + last.fm)
On the road I’d use a laptop or smartphone.
Seriously, what kind of Moron would use precious bandwidth for analog streaming? Controlled by local non-selectable interests no less? This sounds like some century old shit, like Roosevelt did 80 years ago.
Goddamn.
Elizabelle
From the Dallas Morning News website:
Falling ice at Cowboys Stadium injures 6, one critically
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/arlington/headlines/20110204-falling-ice-at-cowboys-stadium-injures-7-one-critically.ece
Hey, if this is what it takes for people to get over their “global warming” denial and consider extreme weather, which we’ve been seeing for a few years now …
AAA Bonds
I’m sorry you got old?
horse dave
If you can get DC 101 you should try tuning to 89.7 WTMD then swing by and pick me up from work and buy me beer. In gratitude I will talk endlessly about my dogs and show you pictures.
Yeah, DC area radio suxs except for WTMD. I even turn off NPR when they present the Repub side. I know what they are going to say and I can’t take it.
Good luck with traffic, Dave
JGabriel
@gbear:
Thanks for the correction, gbear. The only reason I knew it was Twin Tone who hired people to do the recordings was from an earlier comment by you. I must have come up with the contest idea from eliding it in my memory with something else, or bad info on youtube, or something like that.
.
JGabriel
@MikeJ:
Good point. In my defense, I plead special dispensation: I really wanted to link those amazing ’81 videos.
.
Parrotlover77
Since the invention of using the intertrons on my phone, I haveen’t touched Sirius/XM (which got much crappier since the merger) let alone terrestrial radio. I’m only like 7 years younger than Cole. I’m getting scared about the next decade for my own personal mental health.
DFH no.6
You’re wrong, John. The status of “rock and roll” (or whatever of the numerous current sub-genres you could name) is quite good. In fact, I’d say it’s great. You just have to find it somewhere besides crap commercial radio.
Thank the FSM there’s this thing called “the internet”. And “the IPod”, as others have noted here already.
Actually, it’s been many years since radio was a reliable source of good contemporary music. Here in Hellhole, AZ (currently half-frozen; isn’t that ironic?) there was a station, KZON (now defunct), that was all right, but the best we have now is “The X” (used to be The Edge, and used to be better, too). The X will play some good new stuff, like Gorillaz or Metric or Silversun Pickups, some good 80’s and 90’s like Pixies and Nirvana, but then a whole lot of crap like Panic at the Disco or My Chemical Romance, etc.. I’m guessing you hooked up with a similar station.
Try this instead: check out the 2011 Coachella lineup (I’m a geezer, so way at the outer edge of the Coachella demographic, but I’m going again this year and I’m stoked). It’s fairly representative of what “the kids” are listening to these days, and there are over 180 bands who will be playing this time. They all play music they have written recently (even those who have been around for a while). Use the intertubes to sample the music of these 180+ bands. You won’t like all of it; you may even dislike the majority of it. That’s ok – nobody will like all these bands, and even those who have the most catholic of musical tastes probably would dig maybe half of them.
But you surely will find a fair number you can get into. Try Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Animal Collective, The Chemical Brothers, Ozomatli, HEALTH, The New Pornographers. All at Coachella this year, along with almost 180 other bands.
I’ve been listening to contemporary music and going to concerts since the sixties, always trying to keep up with what’s current and not stagnate with moldie-oldies, and IMHO there’s never been a better time for “rock” music than now.
morzer
Interesting bit of news from the census data: guess which state is on track to be a minority majority state in 2030, and already has 60% of under-18s being non-white?
http://bluevirginia.us/diary/3013/forget-red-or-blue-virginia-how-about-brown-virginia
Yup, the Old Dominion. Bobby Lee is starting to spin in his grave.
frosty
@Elizabelle: If you miss WHFS, see if you can get WTMD out of Towson University, 89.7. They even brought Weasel back!!
DFH no.6
@13th Generation:
Great modern rock sub-genre. Lotta excellent bands there. John should check some of them out.
frosty
@geg6: Loud? You want loud??? Grand Funk Railroad at the LA Forum. My ears rang for a day and a half afterward.
Elizabelle
@frosty:
Weasel back! You don’t say.
Checking it out.
BruceFromOhio
@Tony J: I’ll be laughing at this for days.
BruceFromOhio
@Mark S.:
Well, whaddyaknow. That sounds like there may be some mighty fine pirate radio markets out there. Somewhere.
piratedan
@polyorchnid octopunch: ahhh we shouldn’t forget that Canada still has some decent bands still playing, Odds, Big Wheel are two of my favorites and you have forgotten the brilliant lads from Red Rider. I still have a soft spot for Shadowy Men from a Shadowy Planet because Having an Average Weekend still kicks ass to this day.
piratedan
@gene108: based on what you’ve listed as liking, you might want to give Black Cat a try and maybe even This Ugly Yet Beautiful World. As for films, you might enjoy Howl’s Moving Castle and for more adult tastes, check out Paprika.
piratedan
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): definately agree that GITS is a very intelligent series, I’ve enjoyed both seasons of it. Not as fond of X when I first encountered it but I’ve also found that at times I wasn’t “ready” for that particular show at the time that I was introduced to it and that others that I enjoyed the first time through didn’t have repeat viewability qualities. So maybe its time to give it another chance.
Paula
Should not have read the comments on this article …
burnspbesq
@polyorchnid octopunch:
Dude, you forgot about Kathleen Edwards. Inexcusable!
burnspbesq
@Jager:
CKLW was the bomb. On a night when the conditions were good, we could get that in North Jersey. Beat the heck out of WABC.
Beginning in 1967, and through the late 70s, the best radio station on earth was WNEW-FM. Harry Harrison, Richard Neer, Scott Muni, Jonathan Schwartz, Alison Steele, and Dennis Elsas. Later came the inimitable Vin Scelsa (who can now be heard on Sirius/XM’s The Loft). And on the rare occasions when NEW wasn’t getting it done, you could flip to WLIR.
Shelton Lankford
Three words.
Pandora, Smart phone.
polyorchnid octopunch
@piratedan: The Odds are done, and have been for quite a while. They do seem to get together from time to time…
polyorchnid octopunch
@burnspbesq: Well, given that most of the people here are Americans, I’m figuring on starting them with the classics. I could pump great bands like Warped 45s and Tom Savage Trio, Luther Wright and Sarah Harmer (and their seminal band Joe’s Funeral).. ever listened to Luther Wright and the Wrongs bluegrass version of The Wall? But you know… that stuff is all more country, I was looking for rock and roll (and the Rodeo Song is about as punk rock as you can get, even if they’re a country band). If you’re liking the alt country, there’s a lot of really excellent stuff going on up here; we get a band rolling through my home town about twice a month these days.
PanurgeATL
@Mnemosyne:
But what does that say about the real state of rock these days? I mean, I’m glad for you that you like it, but if the same thing were happening to classic rock, the post-punk hip crowd would be beside themselves inveighing against the intolerable stagnation.
Gus
@stuckinred: I also saw Arthur Lee near the end of his life. Unfortunately he was getting over laryngitis, so while his band was fantastic (and young enough to be his grandkids), it wasn’t a good show. I love Love, though.